Marketing to teenagers is tricky; ask parents of teenagers! And marketing to teenage girls gets even more interesting. Clean and Clear, the skincare brand from Johnson & Johnson is looking to do this in a creative way with the new ‘Besties’ campaign. The brand has launched a series of videos featuring two best friends that deal with life issues around teenagers, in the new video campaign launched last month.

The idea is to appeal to its target audience: the teenage girl and her best friend. The videos feature two besties – Naina and Mishka as they capture some of the sweetest moments of best friendships as well as discuss ways to deal with breakups, boys, moms and selfies.

Content created revolves around catchy headlines like – ‘5 ways how friends are different from besties’, ‘The 5 epic selfie disasters/fails’, ‘The 5 types of boys to avoid in college!’ and more.

This one gives you ‘7 ways to help your bestie get over a breakup’, with wacky ideas presented by the duo:

At the end of every video, the girls ask the viewer to subscribe and/or like it, and join in the conversations by sharing with relevant hashtags in their tweets or comments. For the above video, the suggested hashtag is #bestiesandbreakups.

The videos are being shared with the brand’s Facebook fan base, supported by interesting visuals and attractive copy to give them a relevant reason. Clean and Clear has more than 777K fans with Facebook revealing the most engaged age group being 18-24 years old. Posts provide tips on taking care of your skin in addition to getting skin care experts to livechat with fans. Regular contests on the timeline are also keeping fans engaged by getting them to share #WackySelfies with their besties or BFFs.

Building communities around issues

Clean and Clear gets its objective right. Creating conversations around oily skin and clogged pores has been done to death, moreover, teenaged girls do not need any more information on why having a clean and beautiful skin is so vital to their confidence and their outlook towards life. Teenaged girls would definitely want to know what kind of selfies do not work and which kind of boys to avoid in college!

The ‘Besties’ campaign, apart from a sound content strategy, has also chosen the right platform to spread its communication. Social media is the favourite online hangout place for teenagers. Engaging teenaged girls and their besties with short video stories and then following it up with conversations powered by hashtags, is a cool way to build a platform. A community can only be built around shared interests or ‘issues’ as in this case, what with the target audience being teenaged girls.

I’m reminded of such a community built by Sunsilk years ago, called ‘Sunsilk Gang of Girls’, a website that had content on everything revolving around girls and their complicated lives.

Besties has the potential to be developed further from a series of videos into a full-fledged social network where teenagers could hang out online. That way Clean and Clear can help establish a strong social presence as best friend to teenagers right from solving her pimple breakout problems to boyfriend breakup issues.